BackUp & Restore Data in Outlook

One of the biggest problems before an average Outlook user is “How to do I BackUp my Mails in Outlook?”, and its pretty important to regularly backup mails for that unfortunate day when windows breaks all hell lose, and there is no way out, but a format or worse a hard disk crash!!! So don’t fret because, here’s the showdown on how to do BackUp & Restore all your data in Outlook

Backing Up the Data:

Launch Outlook.

Go to File > Import and Export.

On the next pop up, select Export and click Next

Then click Personal Folder File (.pst) and click Next again.

Then select the folder you want to backup, just make sure you have put a check mark in the box that says “Include subfolders“, to backup everything properly. If you just want to backup a single folder do so by selecting it by hitting the plus sign.

(I have renamed my Personal Folder as Gmail)

Give the location you want to store it at. Maybe the “My Documents” folder or even you “Desktop”

Then you will be presented with an option to encrypt the files.

And then your backup is complete.

Depending on the size of your mail file, the backup will take up to an hour to complete (and you can’t use Outlook while it’s working) and the file will usually surpass a gigabyte in size, so be warned.

Now I would suggest you backup the file to an external drive, or burn it on a CD/DVD, for that unfortunate day.

Now to Restoring Data:

Launch Outlook.

Go to File > Import and Export.

On the next pop up, select Import from another program or file and click Next.

Now you will be asked to select the folders you want to backup and where. (to restore everything, click Personal Folders and make sure “Include subfolders” has a check mark next to it.)

Hit Finish, and you are done!!! It’s back to the way it was. And don’t worry about duplication, because Outlook will take care of duplicates unless you selected “Allow duplicates to be created.” in step number 4.